''THIS is not an episode of Celebrity Big Brother, this is about who should be prime minister,'' Julia Gillard informed the nation yesterday morning.

Props to the Prime Minister for her first on-the-record popular culture reference, although it doesn't bode well that the show in question was cancelled in 2008 after years of declining ratings and mounting public disgust.

Gillard was trying to make a serious point, of course.

While Kevin Rudd seeks to position himself as the anti-Canberra candidate, the populist against the machine, the cuddly moonface versus the faceless men, she is the candidate of substance.

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The calm and sensible one, the one who does stuff, rather than the blond who is famous for doing nothing.

''Talk is easy, getting things done is harder … I am the person who gets things done,'' she said.

But the Prime Minister was wrong in her comparison.

Celebrity Big Brother, often bitchy and occasionally entertaining, was far too benign a show to serve as an apt metaphor for the vomit-and-blood-spattered back-alley brawl that this leadership contest has become.

A better comparison is Sons of Anarchy, a drama about a bikie gang in which heads are regularly stove in with lengths of pipe. Where the c-word is scattered through the script like confetti. Where one character is murdered with a heroin hot shot administered by her own mother-in-law.

It's dirty, it's nasty, and it's hard to see how the government can pick up the pieces afterwards.

Yesterday, more ministers set about booby-trapping the leadership.

The Attorney-General and former health minister, Nicola Roxon, said she wouldn't work with Rudd.

Roxon described what she said was Rudd's lack of cabinet process over national health reforms as ''a ludicrous way to run a government''.

The Employment Participation Minister, Kate Ellis, said Rudd had been bad-mouthing Gillard for months, and he was ''hypocritical'' to pretend otherwise.

Rudd lobbed a petrol bomb at Gillard at his afternoon press conference, when he said that she had lost the public's trust.

He went about eroding it further by revealing Gillard had argued in cabinet that an emissions trading scheme should wait for bipartisan agreement.

Cabinet confidentiality ain't what it used to be.

''I simply ask you to put into wider context who is responsible for the government's current poor standard,'' Rudd said, not so rhetorically.

Sadly, this is not a reality television show, it's reality.

The show that won't get cancelled, the program we can't turn off. The kind of viewing that makes you long for the test pattern.

25 Feb
THE key independent Andrew Wilkie has ruled out ever striking another formal agreement with Julia Gillard, but left open the possibility of writing a deal with Kevin Rudd if he were to become prime minister.

25 Feb
I worked for the Rudd government for just more than a year in 2009 and early 2010, including seven months as one of Kevin Rudd's speechwriters. I met him only four times in that period, so I don't know him well.